Great Famine

The Great Famine, also known as the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1849, caused by a potato blight, single-crop dependence, and neglect and misrule by the British government and absentee landlords. The island's population was reduced by 25% as the result of mass emigration and 1 million deaths, and the Gaelic-speaking population in the north and west of the country was the most severely affected.

Background
In the Tudor age, England had taken violent possession of Ireland. Since then, Ireland had come through a difficult few centuries. Queen Elizabeth I of England's armies brutally crushed the country, and James I of England established a plantation to pacify the north that included many Scots. But the Irish took advantage of the English Civil War to rise up themselves, although Oliver Cromwell put their rebellion down. The Succession Wars brought renewed resistance, though William III of England's victory at the Battle of the Boyne was decisive. With the United Irishmen's defeat, it seemed the British had finally prevailed; since 1800, Ireland had belonged to the Union.

History
Ireland was outwardly prosperous at the start of the 19th century. This was hardly the whole story, though. The Irish had undergone successive displacements since the old landowners were condemned by Oliver Cromwell "to Hell or Connaught" (to either be killed or move to the barren lands in western Ireland). Many of the Anglo-Irish had displaced themselves, becoming familiar figures in Dublin and London society. Known as "absentee landlords", they received regular remittances from their agents, and the middlemen often leased their estates, subdividing them into smallholdings for re-letting on short leases with inflated rents. Tenants were also displaced to higher, more marginal land, to make way for lucrative livestock. They often had to bid for their own plots at auctions as each lease ended, and the rents rose dramatically every time.

A miracle food
By the 18th centruy, the masses were living a life of abject poverty, sustainable only because of potatoes. This New World crop had been introduced in the 16th century. The Irish had traditionally lived mainly on cereals (wheat and oats). Now, any grain they could grow went to the market, along with any dairy products: people sustained entirely on the potato. They were also paid in potatoes for the work they did on larger farms. Yet, remarkably well-nourished, they thrived. Between 1687 and 1791, the population more than doubled from 2.16 to 4.75 million. By 1841, it had risen by 3.4 million, not counting the 1.75 million who had emigrated.

A blighted country
By 1845, a population of more than 8 million was completely dependent on the potato. It was not much of a life, perhaps, but it allowed the country's richer land to be fully productive from the point of view of a landowning class who were largely disengaged. The "blight", as the mold was also called, showed itself in black blotches on the leaves of the plant, but did its real damage underground. The potato first discolored, and then turned into a watery, rancid mush. All of Europe was affected by the blight, but elsewhere, potato was just one among many different food crops grown. In Ireland, the potato dominated agriculture. Approximately half the Irish crop was destroyed in 1845, and this rose to 75% the following year.

Since the Act of Union in 1800, Ireland had not had its own parliament, and Britain, untroubled by the blight and dominated by free-trade thinking, was deaf to pleas for protectionist measures. These might have stopped other food exports from Ireland, which were still proceeding on a massive scale. Tory Prime Minister Robert Peel discreetly shipped in corn from America, but the facilities for making it edible did not exist in Ireland. In 1846, his Whig successor, Lord John Russell, set up programmes to create work, but his Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, Charles Trevelyan, believed the Famine was a divine judgment on the rebellious and feckless Irish. They were thus cast as idle charity-cases, despite the fact that they were still highly productive, and that throughout the Famine, Ireland continued to export food to the world.

Final toll
Britain, the world's leading economic nation, was embarrassed by the international response to this tragic failure. Offers of help to Ireland came from everyone from Native American groups to the Ottoman Sultan. All were indignantly rejected by London. In Ireland, many suspected the motives of those who helped - especially of the British Protestant missionary groups, a minority of whom served religious instruction with their food. The much-exaggerated idea of the "souper" - the desperate, starving individual who converted from Catholicism to Protestantism in return for soup - took hold throughout.

Mortality figures for the Famine are difficult to establish and inevitably contentious. While many could be said simply to have starved to death, many more died of diseases related to famine. Others died as a result of a cholera epidemic. A reasonably cautious estimate would be about 1.1 million dead, and a further 1 million pushed into emigration. There was a cultural cost as well. If the memory of the Famine became a major rallying point for the Irish diaspora worldwide, its effect in Ireland was to weaken the sense of national identity, or of the Gaelic identity at least. Rural Irish speakers bore the brunt of the disaster. An ancient culture was destroyed.

Aftermath
The legacy of the Famine in Ireland was to be both bitter and enduring: Irish emigrants carried their resentment with them around the world. Many Irish went to Britain's overseas dominions, though most ended up in the United States. Across this new diaspora, as in Ireland itself, the mood was rancorous. The Irish had little influence in US society at first, but as they became established, they were able to raise a powerful anti-British voice. From the 1850s, US-based Fenians fought for Irish freedom, but the Home Rule campaign was mainly peaceful. In the 1970s and 1980s, Irish-Americans lent support to the IRA in its armed struggle.